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LINCOLN 






Address Delivered in Chicago, 

February 9th, 1909, before 

Columbia Post, G. A. R. 



By 

GEORGE E. ADAMS 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 



A great political career is partly the result of the char- 
acter of a man, and partly the result of the character 
and demands of the time he lives in. However great a 
man may really be, if his genius does not fit the genius of 
his time, if he cannot render a service to his country or to 
the world at the time when his country or the world stand 
in need of that service, history will take little note of him. 
If King Charles the First had not tried to govern Eng- 
land in violation of the English Constitution, we should 
not have heard of Oliver Cromwell, the greatest ruler 
England ever had. If the British government had treated 
the North American colonies as liberally as it now treats 
Canada and Australia, history would have little to say 
of George Washington. Bismarck is one of the strongest 
personalities known to history. But if Bismarck had not 
lived just at the time when Prussia, Bavaria, Baden, and 
other kingdoms, principalities, and free cities of the Ger- 
man name were ready to be fused into a mighty German 
empire, his place in history would be much smaller than it 
is. It is therefore no disparagement of Lincoln's greatness 
to say that if he had not lived when the slavery question in 
this country came to a crisis, we should know him, if we 
knew him at all, only as an Illinois lawyer, not deeply 
learned in the law, but learned in human nature and gifted 
with the power of clear statement which made him an ir- 



resistible advocate before a jury in a cause which he be- 
lieved to be a just one. 

Abraham Lincoln rendered two great services to his 
country. First he was a great advocate of a great cause. 
Then he was a great President in a great civil war. From 
1854, when the repeal of the Missouri compromise threat- 
ened the territories of the Northwest with the curse of 
slavery, till i860, when he was elected President, Lincoln was 
the foremost advocate of the doctrine that under the con- 
stitution as the fathers understood it, slavery was local 
and freedom was national. 

But his fame will mainly rest, not on his clear logic and 
simple eloquence as the champion of freedom, but on the 
wisdom and firmness with which he guided his country in 
the hour of supreme peril. 

We cannot do justice to his genius as a political leader 
of men without taking note of the confused state of feeling 
and opinion in regard to the Union and slavery at the be- 
ginning of the Civil War. It is misleading to think of it 
merely as a difference between the North and the South, 
the North being for the Union and against slavery and the 
South for slavery and against the Union. It was far more 
complicated than that. There was difference in the North 
and difference in the South. We know that there was a 
strong Union sentiment in the border States so-called; and 
I was once reminded in a striking way how strong it was 
as far south as Georgia. I was talking with a Georgia 
congressman when he said, "I must leave you now, for I 
have an errand in the pension office." Said I, "Has a 
Georgia congressman much business in the pension office?" 
Said he, "I have four thousand pensioners and pension 
cases from my congressional district." Said I, "I did not 
suppose so many of our boys settled in Georgia after the 

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An-' - 

WAV on 



war." Said he, "My soldier constituents did not come 
from the North! they were born in Georgia and their 
fathers and their fathers' fathers before them." Said I, 
"I had forgotten that we had any Georgia regiments in the 
Union army." Said he, "You had none. But you had 
Tennessee and North Carolina regiments. My constitu- 
ents were so attached to the Union that they left their 
families and homes between sunset and sunrise and crossed 
the State line under cover of the dark to enlist in the 
Union Army." 

Lincoln's political sagacity never lost sight of the open 
or secret Union feeling in the border States. If he had 
lost sight of it the war for the Union would have failed. 
But Lincoln's wisdom was shown not only in encouraging 
the Union feeling of the border States, but in controlling 
the radical anti-slavery feeling of New England, which 
would have converted the war for the preservation of the 
Union into a war for the abolition of slavery. If this radi- 
cal feeling had not been kept in check during the early part 
of the war, the Union would have been dissolved and slavery 
would not have been abolished. There were anti-slavery 
disunionists in Massachusetts just before the outbreak of 
the war. One was Wendell Phillips. He called the con- 
stitution, which permitted slavery as a state institution, "a 
league with death and a covenant with hell." When South 
Carolina seceded, he applauded. He wished Massachusetts 
had the spirit to do likewise. Late in January, 1861, he 
made a disunion speech. Late in February he made an- 
other. On the twenty-first of April, standing on a plat- 
form with Old Glory over his head, he said, "I rejoice that 
for the first time in my anti-slavery life I am speaking un- 
der the stars and stripes and welcome the tread of Massa- 
chusetts men marshalled for war." He explained his sud- 

5 



den change of view by saying that he had not supposed 
that the North was in earnest. He had thought that the 
spirit of the North was choked with cotton dust and can- 
kered with gold. He knew now that the war would sooner 
or later put an end to slavery. He demanded immediate 
abolition. When Lincoln refused, he became a bitterly 
hostile critic of the administration. 

A change of view like that which came to Wendell 
Phillips came about the same time to another man, whose 
name and fame are dear to us in Illinois. I mean John A. Lo- 
gan. All the world knows that at the beginning Logan did 
not sympathize with the effort made to maintain the Union by 
force of arms. It was not that he did not prize the Union, 
but he thought the Union was already lost and could not be 
restored. He thought therefore that blood shed to restore 
it would be shed in vain. He knew that Massachusetts was 
in earnest, for Massachusetts blood had been shed in the 
streets of Baltimore. But Logan's early associations were 
such that he did not think highly of Massachusetts or New 
England. To him the real people of the United States 
were the people of the Northwest and he could not believe 
that the Northwest, enterprising and prosperous as it was, 
would abandon its industrial activity and submit to the 
enormous sacrifices of a civil war. But the time came 
when he changed his mind. The story goes that he was 
sitting one afternoon on a hotel balcony overlooking Penn- 
sylvania Avenue when a brigade of Northwestern troops 
came by on their way to the front. It is said that Logan 
watched them in silence and, after they had passed, sat for 
a while buried in thought. And then the light came to 
him as clearly and suddenly as it came to Saul on the road 
to Damascus. He saw now that the Northwest was in 
earnest. He saw that the Union could be saved and would 

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be saved, that the blood shed to save it would not be shed 
in vain, and that the only way to enduring peace must be 
cut with the sword. He hastened to his rooms and packed 
his trunk. He took the first train for home. He called 
on Southern Illinois to rise and Southern Illinois rose at 
his call and followed him into the Union Army. 

Now the greatness of Lincoln's political genius lay in 
this : He was a man of the people. He had a sure in- 
stinctive knowledge of what was passing in the hearts 
and minds of his countrymen. He knew, therefore, what 
was not known by the congressmen, the editors, the schol- 
ars, and the orators of his time. He did not think that 
the political leaders of the South would lead the people of 
the South into secession. But he knew that if secession 
did come, the North would respond to his call and would 
submit to the fearful sacrifice of a Civil War. He saw with 
the eye of faith what Congressman Logan could not see 
till he beheld with his bodily eyes the stalwart regiments 
of the Northwest go swinging down Pennsylvania Avenue. 
He knew what Wendell Phillips, the cultivated scholar and 
consummate orator, could not know till he heard the tramp 
of Massachusetts men marshalled for war. He understood 
what Horace Greeley, the greatest editor in the country, 
and Henry Ward Beecher, the greatest preacher of his 
time, did not understand when, panic-stricken by the spectre 
of Civil War, they urged their countrymen to let the erring 
sisters depart in peace. His political sagacity, his foresight 
of the trend of opinions and events were so marvelous that 
many explained them by the direct inspiration of the 
Almighty. 

If I were to name the three great qualities of President 
Lincoln, I should name them : wisdom, courage, and char- 
ity — and perhaps here, too, in the words of the Apostle, 



we can say that the greatest of these is charity. Consider 
his moral courage. What do we mean by moral courage ? 
We mean the willingness to do our whole duty without fear 
of misconstruction or criticism. It has sometimes been said 
that public life in a democratic republic like ours tends to 
impair the moral courage of a man. It has been said that we 
are so used to the rule of the majority that we let the 
majority rule not only our acts but our opinions and hesi- 
tate to do or to say what we know to be right because we 
dislike to be misunderstood or criticised. Hence it is said 
that many a man in public life will think more of avoiding 
censure than of earning praise. He will not be so anxious 
to serve the people as he is to avoid giving a handle to 
some political enemy in his state or congressional district. 
However this may be, if a man goes into public life as 
Abraham Lincoln did in 1854, believing himself to be the 
representative of a high and holy cause, that cause will in- 
spire him with moral courage. His courage will then be 
like the courage of the crusader. It will be the courage of 
a prophet of the Lord. It will be the courage of that pilot 
of whom Seneca tells in a passage which I once heard 
James Russell Lowell quote, of the pilot, who, while the 
lightning flashes and the thunder rolls and the great waves 
threaten to swallow his ship, looks up into the face of the 
tempest and cries, "O Neptune, you can drown me if you 
will, you can save me if you will, but whether you drown me 
or you save me, I will hold the rudder true." Ralph Waldo 
Emerson said of Lincoln that he was sent to the helm in a 
tornado. I do not suppose that Lincoln in 1856 or in 1858, 
when he had the great debate with Douglas or even in 1859, 
when the leading men of his party were demanding the nomi- 
nation of Seward, believed that he, himself, would be called 
on to hold the helm in a tornado. He did foresee a storm. 



..I believe," said he, "that there is a God-I know He hate 
injustice and slavery-I can see the commg of a storm- 
believe His hand is in it-If He has a place and work for 
me and I think He has, I bel.eve I am ready. I an> noth- 
Tng-but the truth is everything." And so when he wa 
cled to steer the ship of state in the S-at-t poh uca 
storm since the French Revolution, from first to last he 

held the rudder true. 

It was not only sagacity but moral courage that he 
showed in that httle gathering at Springfield, where he 

old his friends that he intended to say, " A t-use d,v ded 
agamst itself cannot stand." They begged h,m to leave 
the words unsaid. They were sure to be misunderstood. 
They would certainly cause h,s defeat. He listened pa- 
tiently and then said, "Gentlemen, the words m"^' stand^ 

I may go down, but if I do, I mean to go down with the 

truth." , , 

When he went to Washington as President-elect, he 
found nearly all the leaders of his party advismg com- 
promise with secession. They had no doubt that the new 
President from Illinois, inexperienced in public life, w^ould 
allow them to guide the policy of his administration. . .ley 
were astonished to hear him say, "My course is as plain as 
Tturnpike road. It is pointed out by the Constitution. 
I have no doubt which way I must go. 

As it was at the beginning of his administration, so it was 
right through to the end. It was not clearly understood 
at the time, but now that the history of that time has been 
written, we know how much we owe not only to his 
saeacity but to his moral courage. 

No great man has ever lived whose career exemplifies 
more fully than that of Lincoln the cardinal qua ities of 
wisdom, courage, and charity. His charity was for the 



9 



slave and the slaveholder, the North and the South, the 
unsuccessful general and the private in the hospital. It 
was a charity that never failed, so that he could turn aside 
from the tremendous cares of State to write that simple 
and delicate letter of sympathy to Mrs. Bixby — lately 
quoted by President Roosevelt — a letter from the President 
of the United States to a poor working woman who had 
lost five sons in the war. 

They are talking now at Washington of raising a fitting 
monument to Lincoln. A great highway between great 
cities, or a bridge over the Potomac, or a park, or a univer- 
sity, or a statue. It is altogether fitting that we should do 
this. But as Lincoln himself said at Gettysburg, the 
noblest way to honor the memory of a patriot is to con- 
secrate ourselves to the work which he did for his country. 
That is, after all, the real meaning and purpose of a Lincoln 
monument. 

A few years ago I saw in a public park of the City of Buda- 
pest in Hungary a noble statue of George Washington 
with this inscription: "Erected by the Hungarians of the 
United States." To me it was the most impressive thing 
I had seen in Europe. For I thought that those American 
citizens of Hungarian birth, when they erected this statue, 
did not mean merely to show their regard for the memory 
of Washington — they meant also to bear witness in the land 
of their birth to their devoted loyalty to their new father- 
land which Washington helped to found. 

So we, honoring Lincoln's memory in this centennial year 
of his birth, do so not for his sake but for our own, because 
in recalling what he did for the American people we give 
ourselves a new baptism of patriotism. His fame needs 
no memorial bridge, or building, or statue. This Republic 
is his monument. Think what has come to this Republic 

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since he died. We hav^e come to be the richest and strong- 
est nation in the world. Our government is the most stable 
government on earth. In the simpler and more enlightened 
diplomacy of to-day which aims to express the views of 
nations rather than the views of rulers and diplomats, the 
public opinion of the people of the United States is the 
greatest political power known among men. More than 
this : We have in the main used our international influence 
at The Hague and elsewhere, as Abraham Lincoln used 
his bodily strength during his boyhood and youth, not to 
quarrel but to prevent quarrels, not to oppress the weak 
but to save the weak from oppression. The world has 
come to understand this ; so that when we send a great 
squadron of battleships round the world, they are every- 
where received not with interest and courtesy alone, but 
with friendly enthusiasm, as if those great engines of war 
were carrying to other nations, as I think, indeed they are, 
the gospel of "peace on earth, good will toward men." 
This honorable and influential position, in the family of 
nations, we owe to the unity of the Republic, and the unity 
of the Republic, so far as we owe it to any one man, we 
owe to Abraham Lincoln. 






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